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Northeast Vision Center in Newport recently bought 100 pairs of special glasses to hand out to patients so they could safely watch the August 21 solar eclipse. They intended the glasses to be a gesture of good will, a service to their customers.

But on Monday Amazon delivered the unfortunate news that the glasses might not be safe after all.

Now, Northeast Vision is urging patients who received the glasses to throw them away. Instead they can come in and get a new pair that will be safe.

The problem, Sophie Logan at Northeast Vision said, is that the market has suddenly been flooded with fraudulent eclipse-viewing glasses as a result of the rare eclipse. And the fraudulent marketers have gotten very good at making their fakes appear to be the real thing.

“We are all so devastated,” Ms. Logan said. “Thank God we only had 100 of them to give out. We have 100 to replace those now, and we’re getting another 100 on Friday for people to come and get.”

The result of viewing a partial solar eclipse without proper glasses could be blindness, Ms. Logan said.

“It’s pretty scary stuff,” she said. “I feel like everyone should be aware of this. In general, I know a lot of people who have ordered from Amazon.”

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BARTON — Rupert Chamberlin stands next to the railing on his deck, which affords a magnificent view of the countryside and the Jay mountain range in the distance. It’s not the view, though, that holds his interest. Although retired, he’s a farmer first and always. And today he’s got his eye on a piece of land just below the house that needs to brush hogged.

As someone who has farmed for most of his 83 years, he says there is a technique to brush hogging. His approach is to first brush hog the land counter-clockwise, and then to do it again clockwise. That way, he says, you get the grass that was only bent over on the first pass. As a finishing touch, he brush hogs the land once more, going back and forth, as if he were mowing his lawn.

His observations about brush, or bush, hogging are likely characteristic of someone who has been working the land as a dairy farmer since graduating from the Vermont Agricultural and Technical Institute in Randolph in 1953. Or someone who has stuck it out through thick and thin.

“I’ve moved five times and haven’t gone a mile,” he says, speaking about a farming life that began when he became a partner on his father’s farm out of college, and eventually took it over in 1958, the same year he started breeding registered Jerseys.

A few years later, in 1960, he took on a life partner when he married Muriel Rochelu, who has been with him through the lean years as well as the ones more robust.

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HARDWICK — The Northern Borders Regional Commission gave a major boost to the proposed extension of Newport’s recreation path when it awarded $425,000 to the Vermont Land Trust on August 10.

Senator Patrick Leahy and Governor Phil Scott were on hand at a ceremony at the yellow barn on Route 15 in Hardwick that once was home to the Greensboro Garage. They presented $2.2-million in border commission grants to ten Vermont projects.

They included $250,000 to the town of Hardwick to buy the yellow barn and convert it into an incubator space for new agricultural businesses; $250,00 to allow Neighborworks of Western Vermont to expand its HEAT squad program to the Northeast Kingdom; and $46,000 to help the Vermont Brewers Association create a mobile phone version of its Brewery Challenge Passport program.

The Northern Borders Regional Commission is a federal-state partnership that helps economic developments in northern parts of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

It was established in the federal farm bill passed in 2008 and first received money two years later. The commission helps fund Vermont projects in Orleans, Essex, Caledonia, Lamoille, Franklin, and Grand Isle counties.

The grant to the land trust will cover a bit less than half the $1-million or so it will take to extend the recreation trail about a mile, from Prouty Beach through Bluffside Farm, said Tracy Zschau, the land trust’s conservation director.

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DATELINE — Several Glover residents attended the August 10 select board meeting here to talk about an attempt last week to blow out the village sewer lines that went wrong.

In Doug Safford’s house, one of the three most seriously affected in the incident, raw sewage rose up out of the toilets even as he stood on the street talking to Selectman Jack Sumberg.

“We heard the gurgling in the lines, and I saw the tanker truck out on the street,” Mr. Safford said. “I went out to see what was happening.”

Mr. Safford said he got short shrift from the equipment operator from Hartigan Wastewater Services of Middlesex.

“He just ignored me and kept doing what he was doing,” Mr. Safford said. “Jack apologized but no one stopped to see what was going on. And when I got back to the house, Cheri was screaming and stuff was bubbling out of the toilet.”

The Glover Select Board hired Hartigan to clear out an obstruction in the sewer line.

Hartigan offers what it calls “vactor” service, a specially equipped truck able to blow out rocks, gravel, and other obstructions lodged inside underground sewer lines.

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BARTON — The Orleans County Fair, which is 150 years old this year, has marked the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of summer for generations of Northeast Kingdom residents. Since 1868, the second year of the fair, people have streamed through the gates of Roaring Brook Park to show off their cattle, watch contests that pit beasts and machines against gravity, and to enjoy gravity defying rides.

From the start, the fair has been a place where serious agricultural pursuits contend for public attention with other activities that, through the years have been considered frivolous, if not downright sinful.

While the fair’s origins may seem lost in the mists of time, the connection between past and present is closer than one may imagine.

On August 31, 1867, a group of men met in Irasburg, then the shire town of Orleans County, and voted to create a society for the “improvement of agricultural productions, useful domestic manufactures, and the mechanic arts.” The Orleans County Agricultural Society moved quickly and the Irasburgh Independent Standard of October 11, 1867, offered a report on the fair, which was held several days earlier in Orleans, then known as Barton Landing.

In his account, A. A. Earle, the editor of the Standard lists the exhibitors who were rewarded with premiums. Among them was one H.C. Cleveland of Coventry, who came away with a total of $6.50 in recognition of the high quality of his Durham cows.

“That was my grandfather,” said Harvey Cleveland, himself a past president of the fair.

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GLOVER — Kate Butler came home from a hard day of work on Monday and was mystified to find her bathroom walls, towels, and counters soaked with water.

“It was really smelly,” she said. “Wet everywhere.”

It tuned out that an attempt to clear out a clogged sewer line in Glover Village early in the afternoon had backfired, leaving several residents with water — or worse — in their bath and laundry rooms.

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NEWPORT — Former Coventry Town Clerk and Treasurer Cynthia Diaz has been ordered not to destroy any more town records or documents and to hand over any still in her possession.

“Defendant has admitted under oath to having destroyed at least some electronic documents,” Orleans Superior Court Judge Robert Bent said in a written order issued on August 3. “To be clear, defendant may not destroy any document or file.”

He ordered Ms. Diaz to turn over all written and electronic town records in her possession by August 20 in preparation for another hearing on August 25.

In court on August 1 for a hearing in the town’s civil suit against her, Ms. Diaz admitted to throwing away a thumb drive containing town financial records after she left office.

“Generally in litigation, we don’t destroy documents,” Judge Bent told Ms. Diaz at the time. “It leads to questions … it shifts the question to the person who destroyed it.”

Ms. Diaz’ management of the documents in her keeping has been a recurring theme ever since forensic accountant Jeff Graham’s audit last year shone the spotlight on irregularities in Coventry’s financial records.

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HOLLAND — Dairy Air Wind has taken down a controversial wind measurement (MET) tower in Holland.

The tower stood in a cornfield on land owned by Linda Champney and leased to Brian Champney of Dairy Air Farm. Renewable energy developer David Blittersdorf is backing the project.

The Public Utilities Commission opened an investigation on July 24 into whether the developer put up the tower in the wrong place — and whether the tower should have been put up at all while a series of motions for reconsideration were on the table.

MET towers are put up to measure wind before going ahead with the installation of a commercial wind development. In December, Dairy Air Wind applied for a Certificate of Public Good (CPG) for a single 2.2-megawatt power-generating turbine.

According to site documents, the CPG application for the power-generating turbine is a separate docket, independent of the fate of the MET tower’s CPG.

Dairy Air Wind was given until August 3 to answer the commission’s questions about the location of the MET tower and exactly when it was put up. But instead, on that day, it took the tower down.

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NEWPORT — Former Coventry Town Clerk and Treasurer Cynthia Diaz said in court on Tuesday that she has destroyed at least one thumb drive, possibly the one the select board and auditor Jeff Graham have been looking for.

Ms. Diaz was in Orleans Superior Court for yet another hearing in the civil suit that the town filed against her last December. The suit asked, among other things, for the return of town records in Ms. Diaz’ possession.

“I was no longer in office, I didn’t need it any more,” Ms. Diaz told Judge Robert Bent when he asked about the fate of the removable computer storage that she is alleged to have used to carry work back and forth from the Coventry town office to her home computer.

“I threw it away,” Ms. Diaz said. “It was mine, and I was no longer employed by the town.”

“Generally in litigation, we don’t destroy documents,” Judge Bent told her. “It leads to questions … it shifts the question to the person who destroyed it.”

Initially, it didn’t sound like Ms. Diaz was talking about the same drive that the select board has been hunting for the past year or more.

Ms. Diaz said that all she had on the drive was an Excel spreadsheet and the template she used to create receipts, adding that she overwrote the information as she recorded new transactions that came through the office.

“It wasn’t a running spreadsheet,” she said.

Judge Bent interrupted her to put her under oath.

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